


Redemption

by goldarrow



Series: Timeline!verse [3]
Category: Primeval
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-26
Updated: 2019-08-26
Packaged: 2020-09-27 01:37:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20399545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldarrow/pseuds/goldarrow
Summary: They find Helen's laboratory.





	Redemption

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Primeval belongs to Impossible Pictures, not me. Unfortunately. Sigh. I mean no harm, I make no profit except satisfaction.
> 
> Lyle, Finn, Blade, and the other SF team members belong to fredbassett, who kindly lends them out.

Life can take a very strange path sometimes. Like mine, for example. 

I was a stupid kid who had an affair with his teacher, was too ashamed to confess, and carried the guilt for over eight years until it finally blew up in my face. 

I spent the next six months after that explosion doing everything I could to atone for that eight-year-old mistake, short of physically wearing a hair-shirt 24 hours a day. When nothing helped, I thought that going out in a heroic blaze of glory to save my friends (aka suicide by dinosaur) just might possibly fix things. Maybe it did for them, but since I wasn’t there any more to see it, the magnificent gesture ended up being just a smidgen empty at my end.

It didn’t actually improve my own prospects at the time, either. Even though Helen Cutter, the authoress of my downfall, my teacher and my betrayer, yanked me to safety through an anomaly at the last second, I was actually afraid that her saving my life had been a bad thing. It meant I still had more payments to make, and I was really tired of paying for an almost decade-old screw-up.

And pay more, I certainly did. She dumped my slightly chewed body in a basement room, dropped off some antibiotic cream and a little food and water, and left me to care for myself until she showed up at my sickroom door again a couple of weeks later. 

Bad penny, thy name is Helen. She proceeded to go all cryptic on me for a few minutes, then legged it. Again. Leaving me for the Special Forces team of this timeline to find. Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that, didn’t I? Helen has worked out how to jump timelines. And this time, she took me with her. 

We’d never even known that there were multiple lines of time. When Cutter first showed up in mine, coincidentally at the same time Helen dropped her little bombshell about her and me, we thought that the original timeline had been wiped out. It seems not. Based on what we’ve worked out in the last few weeks, the timelines all exist, completely separately, but only a tiny energy-flare at the wrong moment away from crossing one into the other. 

Was it in Ghostbusters that they kept saying “Don’t cross the streams?” I think so. Anyway, we’ve discovered that Helen has been playing at doing just that.

It took me a while to get settled into this timeline, but once I got my head out of my arse here in my new home - which I like a hell of a lot more than my old one, thank you very much - I discovered that I had my friends back, my lover back, and my future back, all in one flare of an anomaly. 

The only thing that terrifies me still is that Helen, or fate, could yank it all away at any time. Every time one of us has gone through an anomaly I've been sweating bullets until he or she returned. Whenever Ryan’s gone through I’ve refused point-blank to stay behind. No way in hell am I taking the chance of losing him again. Losing the rest of it would be horrible, but losing him would destroy me. It took him a little while, but he’s got better at accepting that little quirk. He goes, I go. There’s no way around that fact.

xXx

The first time I refused to stay behind was about three days after I finally realised that I had a real chance at a good life here. My arse was still a little sore from that very pleasant lesson. 

The sodding anomaly where they’d found me had opened up in the Mendips again. It stayed open and stable long enough for us to descend on it en masse, and once we got there, Claudia decided that it was worth checking to see if there had been any changes on the other side.

Ryan’s team was assigned and I told her I was going, too. The official reason I gave was that I might be able to tell if something was different. The private reason was that I had turned into Ryan’s human limpet. After giving a few glances back and forth between me and the captain, she raised an eyebrow and agreed. I could carry the anomaly detector and free up a soldier for defence.

Ryan smiled at me. No way was I fooling him, or probably anybody, considering Claudia’s eyebrow, but it didn’t matter to me. We passed through the dancing circle of time slivers, me with every hair on my body doing its level best to stand completely on end as always, and stepped out into the past, or the future, or wherever the fuck it was.

Following Ryan’s orders, I stayed close to the anomaly while his team made a quick run down to the compound. Because that’s what it had turned out to be: an entire sodding compound, with multiple buildings surrounded by both barbed and razor wire. Nasty. I used the time to get some readings on the anomaly strength, so I’d know when it was starting to weaken.

Once they finished making sure the place was secure, Ryan called me down and told me to stick close. I made sure I stayed near to at least one SF guy at all times - the better I followed orders this first time, the more likely I’d be allowed on future missions. He wasn’t authorising me any weapons other than tranq guns yet, but it was only a matter of time, if I could keep on being a good boy in the field. I might be an idiot sometimes where my dick’s concerned, but I’m not sodding stupid. This timeline's Stephen had obviously been more circumspect about munitions. It might take a while for them to be comfortable arming me, but I could live with that.

We went through the entire compound, building by building, and all the while I kept a close eye on the anomaly detector. There was no change in readings after an hour, and we had no luck on finding anything in any of the buildings. It was when we headed into the last structure that I started to get very nervous. This place was ominously familiar. 

Ryan nodded toward the right-hand end of the long room. “This was where we found you,” he said quietly. “Down those stairs over there.”

I shuddered, feeling like ants were crawling on me. Then I realised it wasn’t just the memory. I really felt ants. I peered down my body and arms but saw nothing. Ryan was giving me a very strange look; I didn’t do any more than acknowledge it as I headed across the room to the left hand side. There was another door on that end, and I could feel something weird behind it.

Looking at Ryan, I asked, “You don’t feel it?” 

He shook his head.

“Huh.” I took his hand in mine and set it up against the door. Then he could feel it.

“Shit.” He jerked his hand back. “That is . . . odd.” Giving me a tight grin, he added, “I don’t fucking like odd.” 

Suggesting that I back away, which I could easily tell was more an order than a suggestion, he called Blade and Lyle over to him. Finn was to guard me, and Ditzy and Fiver were rovers, keeping an eye out for any unwanted guests or even less-wanted owners.

Ryan stood facing the door with weapon deployed, and Blade and Lyle flanked him on the left and right. Blade leaned across the door and grasped the handle, giving it a turn. When the door proved unlocked, he nodded at Ryan, who said quietly, “Go.”

Blade set his balance and yanked the door open by stepping back as quickly as he could. Lyle moved quickly through the door from his position on the right to crouch just inside on the left, and Ryan stepped through and moved right. Blade followed to take centre. Then they all stopped and cursed in unison. 

From where I stood, I could see Blade rise from his crouch and let his weapon hang down beside him. I was ready to burst from curiosity before I heard Ryan’s voice in my headset calling me in. I made it across the room so fast I think I might have come very close to teleporting. But once I was there, all I could do was stop in the doorway to stare.

We were standing on a small balcony that looked out over a fairly large underground chamber. The place was filled with equipment of various kinds, some running, some not. But the oddest thing we could see was what looked like a tortured anomaly in the centre of the room.

If someone had told me that an anomaly could feel pain, then this is how I would visualise it looking. It wasn’t a normal anomaly: rounded and plump, with sharp shards circling a cloudy centre like an exploded crystal ball. This one was tall and thin, wriggling like a DNA strand. Each shard wobbled drunkenly up and down its line, no longer sharp and distinct, rather twisting like it was constantly being wrung by invisible hands.

“Jesus Fucking Christ.” Lyle’s whisper didn’t even sound profane, his tone was so reverent.

Ryan was on his radio before the words stopped echoing. “Fiver, get back across the anomaly and get Cutter and Connor here right now. No delays, no questions. Connor brings his computer. And a fucking camera.” He glanced at me. “Strength?”

I pulled my attention away from the anomaly, feeling like I was yanking a heavy-duty magnet off the side of a fridge, and checked the detector. “Still the same. And it’s really strong. We should have a couple of hours at least.”

“Good. We have to find out what the fuck she’s doing here. That thing is even more of an abomination than the regular ones.” 

The expression on his face reminded me of the one time he’d tried to eat some sushi, and for a moment I had a horrible feeling I wasn’t going to be able to control myself. After a couple of deep breaths, I managed to arrange my face into an expression that wouldn’t embarrass me, and clattered down the stairs on the right. They seemed to be the ones that would come out closest to most of the active machines, and there was one there that looked as if it had a mortar barrel pointing at the anomaly. If I could make a head start on working out what was important, then it would save Connor some time.

Giving the writhing strand as wide a berth as I could, I headed over and started checking the machine with the mortar. It was definitely running, and I had to restrain myself from sticking my hand in front of the barrel to see if I could feel anything. If I melted my hand off I was sure Ryan would never forgive me. 

I couldn’t make head nor tail of the readings; electrical engineering had never been my forte, but I could at least tell that the output emanating from the barrel was electrically based. I passed that info on to Connor, who was already this side of the anomaly. His breathless voice sounded like he was running, then almost tripping, and I had to restrain another inappropriate grin. Brain the size of a planet, and coordination the size of a pea. Sometimes I got the impression he’d finished up his final growth spurt not too long ago, and hadn’t quite caught up with his muscles yet.

About the time Cutter and Connor came blasting through the door and Connor almost fell down the stairs because he was staring at the squirming anomaly, I found a computer that looked like it was holding accounts of some kind. 

“Connor,” I called. “Ignore the boogieing spaghetti. This might be even more important. I think I found her records, but I don’t want to touch anything I might wipe.”

With Cutter following a trifle more circumspectly, Connor slid down the last two steps and used the momentum to make it across the room in record time. Plunking himself into the chair, he pulled out his laptop with a grin. 

“I’m not even going to look at that thing until I get all the records I can save here,” he said quickly, keeping his back to the fascinatingly horrible object behind him. “It’s like the One Ring. I just have to pretend it’s not there.”

I joined in an amused glance with Cutter. I thought we were the only ones in the room who’d actually got the reference until I heard Fiver and Finn start to trade barbs about whether the movies or the books had been better. That raised the professor’s eyebrows to just south of his hairline, and he leaned over to whisper, “If I were a betting man, I’d’ve just lost my wager on those two.”

“Me, too,” I grinned back. God, it was so good to have the old easy relationship back. I felt myself starting to get the guilts again, so I throttled them down hard and rested my hand on Cutter’s shoulder just to finish stifling the negativity.

Sometimes I hate that I’m so transparent to the people who care about me. And sometimes I love it, like right then. He smiled, and when he added a quick squeeze of my hand the last lingering flake of guilt was completely crushed.

“Holy fucking shit.” Connor wasn’t usually the type to curse, so those three words grabbed the attention of everyone in the room. 

“What is it?” Cutter was the first one to speak.

The young man shuddered as he wrapped up whatever computer bits he’d been using to connect to the other machine. Once he had them stowed, he pushed his laptop into the pack with the other stuff, and handed it to Blade. “Guard that with your life, chum,” he said seriously.

Blade took the backpack and without a word traded it for the one he had been wearing, which he passed on to Fiver beside him. 

Connor nodded, then turned back to look at Cutter. I’ve seen Connor scared, I've seen him angry, disgusted, and even hurt, but I’ve never seen him horrified. And he was horrified. Whatever he’d seen in those files was going to be the stuff of nightmares.

“Professor,” he started. “That anomaly right there connects to another anomaly in a parallel universe. This machine holds the anomaly open and locked, so it can’t close. That’s why it looks so twisted. It wants to close and it can’t.”

“Holy shit was right.” Lyle’s voice was soft but clear.

“Yeah.” Cutter stared at the wriggling column. “So, she’s connected anomalies in two timelines. And she’s holding them connected for some reason.” He looked over at me. “Could it be your home line?”

I grimaced. “I hope not.” They stared at me. “I mean it. And more than just for personal reasons. In my timeline, we may have the ARC, but here we have as much or maybe even a little more knowledge about how the anomalies work than we did back there."

Cutter started to speak, but I stopped him. “Cutter, Helen was fucking with us constantly back there. Every time we started to get somewhere with researching the anomalies, she’d show up and toss a spanner into the works. It happened over and over again.” I ran my hands through my hair in frustration. I knew from Ryan’s expression that the phrase ‘just fucked look’ was running through his mind, but I couldn’t even respond to that right now. I was too focussed on what I was trying to get across.

“I think, right now, that we should take what we have back through our anomaly, bring over Connor’s anomaly-lock prototype, blow up this fucking building and every piece of equipment in it, and if this anomaly doesn’t close after it’s free, then lock it down until it does.”

“Why?” Cutter’s voice was level, but I could see the war being waged inside him: the fight between choosing safety and choosing knowledge.

Surprisingly, it was Ditzy who responded. “Do you really want to be able to easily jump timelines? To have Helen Cutter able to easily jump timelines? For anyone at all to have the kind of power that can change reality, not just in our own world, but in any other worlds we might encounter?” 

Cutter looked at me. “If not for this machine, we wouldn’t have Stephen back.”

That was a low blow. But I fought past the wound those words opened in me. I knew Ditzy hadn’t been thinking about me when he spoke, and I knew Cutter didn’t mean to turn Ditzy’s own words back on him in a bad way. 

“That’s true,” I responded when everyone else stayed silent, also looking at me. “But, Nick, if it came down to a choice between possibly mucking up multiple timelines and destroying any or all of the living things in them, or one man not surviving, then which would any sane person choose?”

He nodded, defeated. “That’s true, also,” he said quietly. “We have you, and we won’t lose you even if we close this. But I’d really like to know what she was planning to do with it before we send this place to hell.”

Connor shivered, staring wide-eyed at the anomaly. “She was planning on merging timelines permanently instead of just the momentary crossovers that have happened so far,” he said, voice shaking. 

He looked at me and carried on talking, his words coming faster and faster. “She caught on to the crossovers when she and Cutter ended up in your timeline, Stephen, then she realised what this place was, she’d found it a while back and hadn’t worked it out until then, and once she did she crossed over deliberately, using the anomaly that led into the cage room where she grabbed you." He stopped to take a deep breath. "That worked okay, so next time the anomalies connect, she was going to use,” he pointed to a quiescent instrument across the other side of the room, “that machine there, to test a more permanent linkage to see if either timeline would survive, and why, or if they’d both go ‘pop’.”

“Fucking hell.” This time it was Ditzy who sounded off. Total destruction of uncountable lives would hurt him more than most.

“Why hasn’t she done it already?” Ryan was staring with revulsion at the trapped timeline bridge.

“She hasn’t worked out how to be sure she’d be safe when it merges,” Connor replied, sinking back down into the chair. “There’s no guarantee that the effect wouldn’t ripple through any open anomaly when she did it, so she’s got the connection on this side held open until the anomaly on the other side opens again, too. If this one stays locked, both are safe. But once she works out how to keep herself in one piece, she’ll wait for the alternate to open one last time, and then she’ll release this one. And we have no idea when that will happen.”

I turned to look at Cutter, who was staring at the trapped anomaly with a look on his face that I’d’ve done almost anything to wipe away. When he turned to look at me, all I could do was take a step forward and hold him tight. What must it be like to know that your wife had no regret at the idea of wiping out uncounted billions of people and even entire species of plants and animals, fish and fowl? There was no telling how deep the damage would be from her plans.

After a moment, Cutter gave me a quick squeeze and released me. He looked over at Ryan, who nodded, and then back at Connor. “Lad, I hope you have all the information you need, because we’re going to blow this place to kingdom come.”

Connor nodded. “I’ve got everything, both personal and scientific. But, Professor, I might have too much, if you know what I mean.”

Cutter ran his hands through his hair, leaving every strand looking as horrified as we all felt. “Don’t let anyone know what’s on there. We’ll clean it up before we turn it in. If that’s all right with you, Captain?” Cutter’s voice was almost challenging, but Ryan didn’t rise to the bait.

“More than all right, Professor. There are some things I don’t think we’re meant to know how to do. And this is one of them.”

“I do have one question before we bring in the explosives.” I spoke up reluctantly, but we were playing with fire here. 

Every head swung my way, queries writ large in their expressions. 

“How do we know that the other side isn’t already open along with this one? When we blow up the place, will we simply be releasing the devastation we’re trying to avoid?”

Connor got a look of dismay on his face before he swung back to stare at the machine controlling what was now obviously Helen’s model of an anomaly-lock. “Um, I think I can work that out,” he said.

“Okay,” Cutter replied. “So we get ready to blow the place anyway, just in case. Then when Connor tells us it’s safe, we pull the plug.”

Ryan nodded. “Agreed. Stephen, keep an eye on our anomaly. Lads, we gather up everything we need in order to blow this building and everything in it into the tiniest pieces we can. Cutter, Connor, try to work out if this anomaly here will close if the machine’s turned off. We'll blow it anyway, but it would be better if we don’t have a huge explosion around an active anomaly. And I’d really hate to test what’ll happen if it’s still like it is now when the place goes bang.”

The Special Forces soldiers left on the double for our anomaly, leaving Ditzy behind on guard, and I started scrutinising my detector, wondering if I needed to be closer to the outside anomaly for the best readings. 

Connor must have read my expression when he glanced up, because he grinned and said, “Don’t worry, you can pick up everything you need to from here, and this one is locked down enough it’s not interfering with your readings.”

A wave of relief and self-recrimination washed down me. “Fuck, I hadn’t even thought about that.” Staring at my detector, I had the most awful vision of our anomaly closing and trapping us here while I happily looked at readings coming from this one. 

I shuddered and Connor chuckled.

“Yeah, nasty thought,” he mumbled before his head dropped down again to almost touch Cutter’s as the professor started making extremely esoteric signs over the boards with his hands.

Within half an hour, the Special Forces teams were back and I started breathing fully again. Ryan had disappeared before I’d realised it, and I’d been dancing on the edge of internal panic until he returned, still in one piece and still my Ryan as far as I could tell. He gave me a reassuring grin and a quick hug before joining his team in setting the explosives.

I was staring at the anomaly and starting to feel rather surplus to requirements when three things happened at the same time. Connor called out, “Yes!” and pumped his fist in the air, Lyle reported back to Ryan that all explosives were planted and the exploder was wired up and ready, and my detector chirped at me that the strength of our anomaly had dropped a click.

I stood up and said, “We’re running out of time, guys.”

Connor grabbed his hat and added, “The anomaly is unlinked right now, and I can release it from here.” He put his hand on a red switch right above the barrel of the anomaly-lock.

“Okay,” Ryan said. “Professor, your call. We can release this anomaly and then blow the place, or we can leave it locked and blow it.”

“Release it,” Cutter replied soberly. “We’re taking enough of a chance with an explosion around an open anomaly. We have no idea what an explosion along with the release process will do.”

Ryan nodded. “Everyone out. Connor, is that all it takes? Just flipping that switch?” 

Connor nodded. “Yep.”

Ryan waved him away. “Right,” he said. “As soon as everyone’s out of the building, I’ll flip the switch and join you.”

The others headed out. I stayed beside him. “Don’t even try,” I said quietly.

He smirked. “Wouldn’t think of it.”

The all-clear came through our headsets and we turned to watch the anomaly as Ryan flipped the switch. The shimmering column slowly began to unravel, lines of light coming into balance, each shard straightening like it was working its way through treacle, until the entire portal was softly circling, cloudy centre stable once more.

“On our way,” Ryan reported as we headed up the steps at double speed.

Not wasting any time, we ran for our anomaly where all the others were clustered around the exploder. The time-shards were already much paler than they had been.

“Everyone through,” Ryan ordered as we closed in. “Lyle, punch it.” 

The lieutenant gave an almost feral grin as he flicked the switch on the exploder, and I turned to trot backwards for a few paces, watching the building almost rise into the air before it collapsed into a rather large pile of rubble, one end lower than the other as the underground room filled with debris. 

“The machines?” I asked. “None could have survived?”

Lyle grinned at me. “We wired C4 to the computers, too,” he stated. 

At my surprised look, he added, “You were staring at that sodding anomaly the whole time. I was beginning to wonder if it had you hypnotised.” 

I shuddered. “I think it did.” Looking back at the remains of the lab, I saw the other anomaly fold in on itself and disappear, finally free.

Ryan put his arm around me. “Now, we go home,” he said.

“I like the sound of that,” I replied, and kissed him before grabbing his hand to stay connected as we passed through our own anomaly, back to where we belonged.

End


End file.
